the zhaf speaks

Monday, April 23, 2007:

9 pullups for ippt week and a half back. 4 pullups today in a fully recuperated state. What gives?

71 weeks down. 33 to go. Ord in 33 weeks!

There is hope. There just might be light at the end of the tunnel. We're on leave tomorrow woo hoo! For but a day. Which makes it a squeezy short stretch of sunlight before we go back under.

Everyone's heard one version of army daze or another. Tales of toil in the trenches, leopard crawling through mulchy (?) mud, endless pushups situps jumping jacks and all manner of tekan. Then we have stories of utopia in the saf - air force school clerks, 1on2off firemen, singing and dancing in the m-d to the c!

Now how about the grey areas. The clerks who aren't rolling around like pigs in the mud, aren't getting charged for misfiring blank rounds during section battle course outfield, but still spend most of their time stuck in camp staying-in. And hate it all the more so for being smack centre, stuck in limbo.

Time for me to cash in and pen down "The Sanitized Slaughterhouse - Expose(how the frig do you add that lovely appendage above the e) by the Charge Clerk of 1 Gwaredess."

And at the end of it all, a surreal, serene quiescence permeates your being upon being sufficiently privileged and blessed to feast your eyes and grey matter on two movies as exquisite as Pulp Fiction and Snatch.

Until the point where one transcends the callowness of the rebellious/angsty/emo youth, it seems to that the moral black and white that mom/dad/random Holy Book drilled into your head comes out a pretty good default. Despite the pain, the struggle that sticking to your guns puts you through, the time comes when you just might realize the uncommonly common sense behind it, the sheer simplicity of doing the right thing and damning the consequences. The time comes when you realise that those pains you endured were small compared to the excruciating suffering you might have experienced had you chosen to act otherwise, heedless of tradition/elders/cowsense/logic/morals/God.

Push pull. Rubber band. Reel release. Conflicting impulses, urges, desires.

Give me truth over the beautiful lie, for contrived beauty holds not a candle to that which already is ineffable.

-unshackled and unfettered he seeks power sublime- 7:23 am

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Sunday, April 15, 2007:

insouciance.

defiance.

composure.

impudence.

poise.

conviction.

audacity.

tenacity.

equanimity.

...

balance at last?

-unshackled and unfettered he seeks power sublime- 10:38 am

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